Knock Knock Ginger

Ever played that game when you were a kid where you ran up to someone's house (usually late at night), rang their doorbell and then ran like the wind to go hide and watch some sleepy eyed guy answer his door in his boxers (hopefully he was wearing at least that!) wondering who is there at 2:00am? Of course I would never do this to anyone (stop laughing), but the other night someone played a similar game like that on us.

It was 1:00am in the morning and I am soundly sleeping, dreaming of dribbling past the defense in soccer and scoring yet another awesome goal (just like reality of course!) when I suddenly get woken up with an elbow. "Are you awake?" Shiela asks. I quickly think what an odd question because obviously I am now, but I politely reply "Yes". "I think I am having contractions," she tells me. Being the easy going person I am, I glance at the clock and decide that whatever it is it can wait until morning. And back to sleep I go.

A few minutes later I am woken up again with the same question. "Ok, let's time the contractions I say." I start my watch and realize that the contractions are 2 minutes apart. Now in the pre-natal classes we took they told us that when the contractions get to 5 minutes or less we should go to the hospital. However, it is 1:00am, I'm half asleep and I see that the contractions are 2 minutes apart. The problem is that the pre-natal classes made it sound like it would take a while...you know, start at 10 min apart and then slowly work it's way down to 5 minutes. They don't mention that they might just start at 2 minutes! After trying to think about this through all the fog still lingering in my brain, we decide to go to the hospital.

I grab the keys, open the door and start to walk to the car. "You might want more than just underwear on," Shiela calls after me. I glance down and quickly sprint back inside throwing a glance at all the windows in the houses around ours wondering who was all looking. Finally, we were in the car and at the hospital. We were put right through to Antepartum. After a few questions and looks it sounds like they are going to send us home and we just need one more person to check. The doctor comes in, checks the cervix and says Shiela is 3cm dilated already. I'm drifting off to sleep in the chair beside the bed during all this, but when I hear the words "You're going to have this baby now" I quickly perked right up. Did I fail to mention that this baby was currently six weeks pre-mature.

Fully awake now I carry all our stuff to the Labour and Delivery section of the hospital. I walk into the room and tell the nurse there must be a mistake. This room we are in wasn't a hospital room, it was a mini nursey! The best part was the extremely comfortable LAZY-BOY chair that fully reclined into an almost bed position. I quickly sit down, kick back the recliner right to the bed position and start to relax. Shiela lay down in the bed, they strapped her full of wires and then continued to check on her throughout the night.

At 6:30am I wake up to a slight beeping. Nothing big, just the monitor wasn't reading properly. I tell Shiela to press the call button and a nurse comes in to fix things while I drift back to sleep. The next thing I know there is a loud alarm going off in the room, I bolt awake and watch as 6 nurses come crashing through the door of our room all yelling things and moving quickly. I did what I could to help...got out of the way! I watched as they flipped Shiela over, strapped on the oxygen mask, and played with all the monitors. I felt a little left out so I just decided to randomly yell things out like "What's just fell out" and "Is that suppose to look like that?" Finally things calmed down and everyone was just talking at a dull roar. Apparently the monitor was not getting the babies heartbeat and so the nurse hit the panic button and all hell broke loose. Better that than not doing anything so I was fine with it. After that ordeal Shiela was totally fine (she was fine and calm the entire time) and so I went back to sleep.

The next 30 hours or more were a blurr. Shiela wasn't really progressing so we just kicked around the room, played some crib and I would occasionally yell close to the monitor on her belly once in a while to make the needle on the computer jump really high and confuse the nurses when they came in to check on her status. Finally, after around 40 hours in the hospital we went home as Shiela had stopped having contractions and everything was back to normal.

And so the saga continues and we continue to wait. Probably a good thing...we didn't have the baby room ready yet anyway!